Page 50 of Nightwatching

Even so, she had a difficult time remembering the killer’s face. He was too similar to the rest of them. Same puffy, faceless man who thought the things he had were things he deserved.

It felt like a betrayal of her mother that she found the trial horribly boring. It was duller than being trapped in her third-grade classroom, as tedious as the church services it so precisely mimicked. Like church she had to wear her uncomfortable dress withthe shiny black shoes and the tights that never sat right in the crotch. She had to stand when the big guy stood, sit when he sat. Listen to the preaching. Blah, blah, blah, Mercy. Blah, blah, blah, Justice. In the words of so-and-so. Let us now read from. As in church she stared at the statues. Discreetly checked the clock. Sat by Grandma on a long bench. And just like church, her father had begged off with one excuse after another.

“Let him stay home,” Grandma said as they drove across state lines toward the trial. “Everyone reacts differently to grief.”

She decided she liked church better than the courtroom. At least at church there was singing to wake her up and a snack toward the end. At least at church everyone asked forgiveness.

The words that reverberated through the courtroom were even less penetrable than readings from the Bible. Instead of murder, they said manslaughter, though the man slaughtered was, in fact, a woman. Instead of saying plainly what actually happened, instead of describing the immolation of an entire life in a single moment at the hands of this drunken little man and his too-big truck, instead of talking about the soft places crushed, hard bone turned smithereens, precious things irrevocably broken—instead of all that, it was talk of traffic lights. Timing. Little maps, pointed at here and there with an extendable metal rod. Speed limits. Left-turn signals. Blood alcohol.

She glowered at these antiseptic charts. Already at nine she was a list maker, an organizer, had learned at her mother’s side how to take machines apart, how to fix them, splice wires, and use a soldering iron to melt bits of circuit into amenable pools. There was a time for technical discussion, for analysis at a remove. And then there was this place, which should have been filled, like her mother’s funeral, with faces stunned to stiffness or contorted with tears.With people saying they didn’t understand, how could it happen, it was unfair, horrifying, all of them kneading the cold from their hands, lightly touching their arms, their chests, as if to check that yes, they were still alive, somehow, despite her mother being whisked off the board.

But on droned the men at the front as she scratched at the dark stone lodged in her muscle and bone, the unbearably heavy one that slipped from heart to stomach to throat to the core of her brain, whispering, “None of this matters because she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s dead. Some things can’t be fixed. Some things are unfixable. The world can snap in half.”

It took three days. Three days of watching the nondescript man in court, sitting slumped and trying his best to look repentant, but mainly appearing bored the same way she was, as irritated with the procedures as she was.

He was sorry, so sorry, will live with this his whole life, such an awful burden. Upstanding citizen, already punishing himself. Already in a program.And—mitigation. Contribution. What hadshebeen doing, what was she thinking? Remember, it was a rental car. She was an out-of-state driver. Of course she was distracted. Unfamiliar car, she must have been frequently looking at maps to navigate. Yes, her driving record was good, but let’s face facts. Where she was from there are more cows than people, everyone’s a teetotaler, everyone’s record is good. Sure, his blood alcohol was high, members of the jury, but—he looks just like you. Your husband. Your father. Looks like everyone you know. Poor guy. About your same age, isn’t he? Just made a little mistake, unlucky timing. Tell me you’ve never made a mistake? Maybe even that same mistake. And that out-of-state woman, the one whose face is different, isn’t quite right, a woman, here, alone on business? Isn’t that somehowodd? The one who, well, an illness like that, being marked like that, it’s somehow suspicious, isn’t it? Think about her actions. Her mistakes. Her strangeness. Why ruin his life?

Grandma had introduced herself to the prosecution and the police that first day, thanking them for their hard work. By the next morning she was tap-tap-tapping their shoulders, southern politeness turned to steel. “It’s incompetence, is what it is. How dare you? He’ll do it again. Maybe to someone you love next time. You saw what he did. To a young wife. A young mother.”

But from the police, the prosecution, there was only indifference, rising smoky and insidious.

“Please, calm down, ma’am. We work with the facts we have.”

“Calm down—the gall! They’re supposed to speak for your mother,” Grandma seethed. “That’s their whole job. If it’d happened back in Utah, you can bet it’d be different. I’m no fan of the Saints, but there’s some things they understand, and alcohol is one of those things.”

She couldn’t understand why her grandma insisted the lawyers and policemen should feel a responsibility toward her mother. Couldn’t Grandma see they were diodes, capacitors, transistors, each an essential part of the circuit of this place where her mother was reinvented as irresponsible, culpable, suspect, unrecognizable?

The killer was someone in charge of something mildly important in that particular place. And of course he was someone living, and therefore had the advantage of being able to exist. To be looked at, considered, sympathized with.

And her mother was a dot on a chart. Her mother was absence. She could feel that nothingness. There was an infinite, empty place her mother’s love used to fill when she held her, tucked her into bed, packed her lunch, let her push the shopping cart, her mother squeezing her hand as they walked—bum-bum, bum-bum—like a heartbeat,a secret way to say, “I love you,” her mother saying, “My beautiful girl, how’d I get so lucky that you’re mine?” Even these little things had been turned immense in loss, memories that made her tuck her knees to her chest under the covers and fold around her newly hollowed center.

As the judge read the not-guilty verdict, she wondered if the jury needed to believe her mother had done something wrong, had somehow deserved to be violently, painfully destroyed. Because that would mean what had happened to her mother could never, would never, happen to them. Maybe that one was self-consciously scratching at a hairline, that other picking at a cuticle, all of them avoiding looking in her and Grandma’s direction, because somewhere inside they heard a little voice whimpering, “That could’ve been me. That could’ve been someone I love. Someone who loves me.”

The jury didn’t want to see, the way she did, that invisible threads, delicate and easily torn, lay beneath everything. A distant breath of random chance, a choice made by a stranger, could split them, ends floating like cobwebs while precious things tumbled through to darkness, unrecoverable.

Some things can’t be fixed. Some things are unfixable. The world can snap in half.

“It’s an injustice, is what it is,” Grandma lamented.

But justice wasn’t possible. Justice would require the jury return her mother, whole and alive. Only the possibility of sanitized vengeance was on offer, and even that had failed.

After the verdict, Grandma pulled her into a hug, whispering, “His ways are not ours.”

But there was no possible reason she would ever accept, no larger meaning possible, in the horror of her mother’s death. To survive it, she clung close to the memory of her mother’s effusive joy over everyday things. The hummingbird at the feeder, the precise twist ofa wire, snowfall, a perfectly cooked egg, to all these simple things her mother would say with genuine wonder, “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it just beautiful?”

Curled under the covers around the well of her grief, she remembered her mother’s fingers running through her hair. The squeeze of her mother’s hand saying,Bum-bum, bum-bum, I love you.The uneven bend of her smile. She saw that even the odd angle of her top pinkie joint, the way she constantly hummed to herself, was special, important, and all of these small, wondrous fragments let her form a scaffold of meaning, a will to go on. Life had to be beautiful, because her mother had said so. Life had to be precious because it was delicate, could so easily disappear into absence. Yes, she had to survive desolation, because although her mother was no longer there to bear witness to the world’s beauty, its tenuousness, she still could.

She watched the magnetic, swirling loveliness of the dust motes dancing in the courtroom sunlight as the judge sentenced the man to fifteen months. Not for murder, not for manslaughter, but for the lesser, guilty charges of driving under the influence. Of leaving the scene. With time served, twelve months. The benign little killer was out on parole in eight months. Less time in jail than her mother had taken to create her life; create her entire existence.

Other people expect them to sprout horns. Other people think evil knows it’s evil. Other people say, “He’s a good man, really.”

But no. She and Grandma had that front-row seat to see that evil can look like a little nobody, a little anybody, shedding his crocodile tears. Evil can be a saggy, slumping man, who, when the judge read the sentence, couldn’t repress the satisfaction brimming his eyes. Eyes that said, “Yes, see? Justice! I’m not so bad after all. I’m no worse than anyone else, just as I always suspected.”

Even though, of course, he was worse. Unrepentant, unreformed worseness, unable to understand the vastness of what he’d taken, thefundamental importance of a life that wasn’t his. Evil’s face so forgettable in its everydayness that not even she, whom it mattered most to, could hold that man’s features in her mind. Just recalled the balding head on the pudgy body. The graying, thinning hair. The sense of relief radiating out from him after the long, boring process of injustice.

Nine months after the trial, Grandma sat her down. She’d gotten a call. The man who destroyed her mother had been less than thirty days out of jail when he and his wife were killed in a car crash. The man’s blood alcohol, Grandma said, “was higher than a light pole.

“God set it right,” Grandma insisted.

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